Monthly Archives: April 2015

Canada has a multi-party political system although the way they all tend to operate means that it isn’t much of a party for most of us.

At the federal level there are five main parties. I define ‘main’ parties to be those which actually have seats in Parliament. There are many other parties including the Libertarian, the Marijuana and the Communist parties but typically they are considered fringe parties, garnering a very small percentage of the vote.

The main federal parties are the Conservative Party of Canada, the Liberal Party of Canada. the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP), the Green Party of Canada and the Bloc Quebecois

Both the Conservatives and the Liberals are centrist parties. The Conservatives are right of centre, the Liberals to the left. They share more in common, however, than they do with any of the other parties and most non-committed voters swing back forth between them at every election.Continue reading →

Once again, Communism rears its ugly head to show just how repressive it is. It is pure evil as The People’s Republic of China has again demonstrated. China has outlawed strippers at funerals.

The heartless bastards!

It seems that many in rural China had started hiring exotic dancers to entertain at funerals or as one person put it, “to add to the fun” of the occasion. It was obviously a natural extension of traditional folk dancing.

I admit that when I first heard this I was both surprised and not just a little impressed that China actually had strippers. You just automatically assume that it would have been one of the first things on the Mao Top 40 hit list. But after my initial reaction subsided, I saw this for what it is – naked repression. Continue reading →

When it comes to most things in life, it appears that there are usually only two sides.

In politics there is a right side and a left. When it comes to risk there is an upside or a downside and socially you’re either on the inside or you’re outside looking in. You can turn yourself inside out trying to figure which side you’re on at times.

You can sit cozy and warm fireside or shiver outside in the cold. I have learned from practical experience that when you fall off a ladder you can land upside down or right side up. I’ve managed to achieve both which confirms that I am gravitationally apolitical. Continue reading →

You could be forgiven for thinking that happy days were here again if you listened to Ontario Finance Minister Charles Sousa table his budget in the legislature. He was positively exuberant, hissing out Yessss!! every so often after announcing yet another initiative. Occasionally, he even turned to his colleagues on the back benches to give a thumbs up.

You could also be forgiven after reading his budget if you thought it was his middle finger he was raising and not his thumb.

This is a budget that tries to be both austere and extravagant at the same time. A finance minister can internally hemorrhage trying to pull that off although that didn’t happen. Mr. Sousa could barely contain his excitement as he unveiled his financial plan for the province. Continue reading →

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.Abraham Lincoln

So which one are you. Are you fooled some of the time? Never? All of the time? I confess that I have been fooled some of the time. Certainly, our political leaders seem to think that most of us are so delusional that we can be fooled pretty much all of the time and, it would seem, there are more than a few of us who can.

It takes two to fool you. The manipulator and yourself. If you don’t allow yourself to be fooled – most of the time you won’t be although a few manipulators are so good at it that even the best of us can be fooled some of the time.

We see it all the time with people getting burned after having invested their money with people like Bernie Madoff. They ‘wanted’ to believe that he could earn them more on their investments than the market was generally delivering and that willingness to be fooled was driven by greed for a few more bucks.

If it’s too good to be true, it usually is but even though we all pretty much know that many of us will ignore that warning to grasp the illusion. Continue reading →

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strengthGeorge Orwell, 1984

Lord, what fools these mortals beWilliam Shakespeare

I remember when we were kids, we took more than just a little delight in hurling insults at those we didn’t like. Sometimes, it was a precursor to a fight but most of the time it was more an exercise in expressing the superiority of ‘our side’.

Much of the time it was pretty mundane, if hurtful, insults that bordered on bullying. If you were overweight, you could expect to be called fatty, porky or fatso at some point by someone or some group who cared less about your feelings than they did about striving to get others to like them. Sometimes, it could get quite colourful and when it did, we referred to it as ‘Doin’ the dozens’; a more formal, almost ritualized even good-natured at times approach to seeing who could come up with insults that topped the other guys (or at least, we thought they did).

Some of the more imaginative among us came up with such notable phrases as: Continue reading →